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If last week's earnings reports are any indicator, data deduplication is the storage industry's belle of the ball. That's despite debate over where dedupe works best in a storage infrastructure and vendors' various sales approaches.

What's not in dispute is the technology's compelling return on investment, and that the fact that dedupe has yet to even scratch its potential market base.

Analyst firm RW Baird expects the optimized disk-to-disk storage market to grow from $250 million this year to about $1 billion by 2009, thanks to spiking demand for high data availability, and the enterprise desire to replace tape.

No wonder the dedupe industry is filling up fast with both startups and storage titans wanting in on the action.

"Every solid storage player will have to have a dedupe technology play," Baird analyst Jayson Noland told InternetNews.com.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) is the latest one to grab it, gobbling up Diligent just last week. It's now playing in the sandbox with EMC, which is supposedly aiming to acquire Quantum, as well as Sun and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).

Slootman mentioned repeatedly that his company is aggressively hiring sales people. In one aspect, it accounts for expected expansion, yet it may also be tied to the act that Data Domain refuses to enter the OEM realm. The Santa, Clara-based company hired on 92 new sales and marketing staff in the past three months, and said the hiring momentum will continue throughout the year.

"We have our pedal to the floor," Slootman said in the call. "Data Domain is positioning deduplication storage as a new tier for data that customers don't want on tape for performance reasons and don't want on primary storage for cost reasons," he said in a statement.